Left-to-Right On-Line Parsing

Abstract

One of the major characteristics of our algorithm is that an input sentence is parsed strictly from left to right. Although some other parsing algorithms, including Earley’s algorithm and breath-first ATN, also have this characteristic, only a few practical systems, if any, have taken advantage of it. Taking advantage of this left-to-right-ness, we have implemented on-line parsing on the basis of our parsing algorithm. The on-line parser starts parsing as soon as the user types in the first word of a sentence, without waiting for the end of line. In this section, we describe the benefits of instantiation of on-line parsing, and discuss some of its practical applications.